


Follow You Forever

by smolonde



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Airport Setting, F/M, ghost haunting AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 04:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4506945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolonde/pseuds/smolonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux discovers a girl in the men's room of the airport, and he finds himself thinking about her regularly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Follow You Forever

The first time she finds you, you’re not alone.

You’re sitting with your girlfriend in the terminal of Houston’s airport, getting ready to catch a flight out to visit her family. You’re scared, mostly because her mother is a baking baroness and a ruthless businesswoman, and from what you’ve heard about her older sister, she’s not exactly sugar and spice. Your girlfriend, though, doesn’t seem to share any of her family’s traits. She’s bubbly, kind, and while she can be insensitive, she at least tries. You don’t think this relationship is going to last long, but at least she’s kind and caring, and she doesn’t care if she seems shallow.

“Fef, I don’t know if this is the best idea. We’ve only been dating two months, and I don’t know that this is something that couples normally do this early on.”

“Oh, calm down, fusspot. I’m sure everything will be perfectly fine; plus, I don’t think anyone can resist my cutie boyfriend!” she giggles, her eyes sparkling. “Plus, your grumpy douche attitude is just so adorabubble!”

Ugh, the fish puns. Will she ever stop with that?

“I’m going to the bathroom.” You get up, trying to ignore how awkwardly you jump when she affectionately pinches your butt.

 

In the men’s room, you comb your fingers through your hair, heaving a sigh. You really, really don’t want to be here. Then, you feel a soft mist settle around your shoulders. You blink in surprise at the sudden cold, and when you open your eyes, the mist is gone, replaced by a young woman sitting on the counter.

“You don’t have to, you know.” Her voice is hollow, and where you would normally see pupils in her eyes, there are only whites. A cascade of tangled black hair falls down her shoulders. You look at the mirror to make sure you’re really seeing her, but there is no reflection.

You step back, and your eyes widen until you’re pretty sure they’re going to fall out of your head. But instead of scrambling out the door or locking yourself in a stall, you find yourself asking “I don’t have to what?”

Right in front of your eyes, she dissipates. You jump, but then you see a mist descending above the mirror to your left. She materializes, this time leaning against the window

“You don’t have to go and visit your girlfriend’s family if you don’t want to. Take it from me, Sollux, life is too short to spend it with people who don’t care about you, or people that you don’t really respect in a relationship. For example, my sister died when she was just sixteen, and her boyfriend, who she loved with everything she had, cheated on her with a guy that they were both friends with. She died heartbroken, and the last I saw her ghost, she was just as much of a wreck as she had been in life. Relationships change you, Sollux, so make sure that the change is for the better.”

You should run. You’re obviously having some kind of nervous hallucination, and even if you’re not, this girl is something weird. But instead you just find yourself stepping towards her.

“How do you know my name?”

She smiles wistfully. “I’ve been following you since you came into the airport with your girlfriend. People have a certain aura about them, and I thought that yours was interesting. You have a dual nature; one side of you is brooding and capable of lashing out, and the other is wry and humorous. I sometimes follow people around, if only just to get a glimpse of the feelings and experiences I missed out on.”

“Missed out on?”

Her smile becomes wider. “I’m dead. You’re smart enough to have figured that out. I died about four years back, when I was twenty-two. That’s not a full life.” She squints, scrutinizing you. “You’re what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Ah, so you haven’t lived much longer than I have. Life is full of experiences and discoveries. Dying isn’t all that different; you just have to live through the experiences of others.” She smiles gently. “Now go. If you want to go with your girlfriend, then I wish you the best of luck. If you don’t, then figure out what you want to do next.” She starts fading into translucence.

“Wait! What’s your name?” you say frantically, trying to rearrange her particles with your eyes.

“Aradia Megido. Now go!” she says more insistently. And she vanishes in a cloud of white mist, which floats past you in a rush of warm air.

 

“Sol, are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost!” Feferi worries for a second, but then the announcer calls your compartment number and she squeals. “Come on, silly, it’s time to go!”

“Yeah, Fef…. About that.” You cannot believe that you’re taking advice from a bathroom hallucination. “Look, I think we’re rushing this relationships. I mean, two months in and you want me to meet your parents? That’s too fast, and I’m starting to think you only want me because you like the idea of having a boyfriend.” The words pour out of your mouth, and your immediate thought after finishing is _oh my god I’m an asshole._

Feferi’s eyes widen. “So… are you breaking up with me?”

You look down at the ground in embarrassment. “Uh, yeah. I’m really sorry.”

Her lip curls up, and you think that she’s about to cry. You are quickly corrected when, fast as lightning, she clubs you over the head with her enormous pink purse. After about four smacks, you are seeing stars. She gets up and walk towards the terminal, nose in the air.

Damn, that feels strangely relieving. You look around tentatively and call out to the empty air. “Uh, thank you!”  
This does nothing but earn you some strange looks from passersby, but when you’re about to leave, just before you step into the cold air, you think you hear a giggle drift past you.

                                                                                                *****

When you meet her next, you’re going to Philadelphia on a business trip.

You’re walking through the airport almost a full year after the incident in the bathroom. Feferi is all but forgotten, but the ghost girl sticks in your mind. Your dreams are filled with her laughter, which resembles the tinkling sound of bells, and visions of her long black hair floating in the air as if she were underwater. You’ve thought about going back to the airport on the pretense of flying out to see your big brother, but you’re not even sure if she was real or a figment of your imagination. Nevertheless, when your boss told you about flying out, you felt a tingle of hope in your chest. You know it’s stupid, but you want to see her again. Maybe it’s because you haven’t been able to stop thinking about her, and some hopeful, desperate part of yourself leaps up at the chance that just maybe she’ll come to you.

Your flight leaves in thirty minutes, so you walk into the bathroom again. You wait in a stall until all the other people have left, and then you unlock the stall, take a breath, and stand in front of the sink.

“Um. Aradia? Are you here?”

No response except the hollow echo of your words, bouncing off the walls back at you. Embarrassed, you wonder if maybe you can summon her by saying her name into the mirror three times.

“Shit. This is stupid. Aradia, Aradia, Aradia.”

As you expected, nothing happens. You heave another sigh and turn to leave, but you stop cold when you hear a giggle behind you.

“Looks like I underestimated how much of an absolute dork you are.” You whirl around, and there she is, sitting on the counter, her grey skirt neatly tucked under her folded legs.

“It’s kind of cute! You came here to look for me, and I was following you the entire time. I can’t believe you tried that “bloody Mary” thing.” She laughs, and you’re surprised to hear a cute little snort come from her. Your heart speeds up just a fraction, a blush rising to your face.

“Don’t let it go to your head, dead girl,” you growl, trying to make yourself sound antagonistic but just ending up sounding embarrassed. You try to brush her off, but she giggles louder and floats halfway into the mirror. “You’re sounding a lot more enthusiastic than you were when I last saw you.”

“Well, I was looking forward to seeing you again, so forgive me if I’m happy.” She rolls her eyes to show you that she’s being sarcastic, and you feel a little tingle in your stomach. Holy shit, she’s adorable.

“I’ve got thirty minutes before my flight takes off. Do you want to maybe talk? About death and stuff. I’m curious.” You sit down on the counter, then think better of it and lock the bathroom door.

“Why don’t you start? I want to see what you know.”

“Why are you assuming that I know anything about death?”

Aradia smiles. “You have the ability to see me. Not many others do, and the ones who can choose to ignore me. That makes me think that you must have had some kind of paranormal experience before.”

You flash back to when you were seven years old and paying a visit to your grandfather’s grave. You remember being almost the same height as his gravestone, and you weren’t really clear on the whole ‘death’ thing. You remember your brother loading you into the car, tears running down his face, incoherently babbling. And you also remember sitting and talking to your grandpa for hours, waving bye-bye as he disappeared back under the earth, smiling at you.

“Um, yeah. I have.”

She nods and smiles. “So, what do you know about death?”

“Well, I’d imagine that it’s pretty lonely, being trapped in a bathroom with no friends or family.”

She winces slightly. “Well, I’m not completely alone.”

“What do you mean? Are there more ghosts in here?”

“There’s the ghost of the girl that murdered me.” She shuts her eyes, as if staving off a memory that seems to invade her all the same.

You find yourself leaning forward. “What’s the story behind that?”

Aradia grins at you. “It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time. Twenty-three minutes, to be exact.”  

“I was planning on taking a plane out to meet my friends for a roleplay session, but then one of them, the girl who’s also here, hurt the guy that was on my team. So I sent her several nasty phone calls, and I guess that I might have scared her, but she flew out here, sending me a message from my friend. The message said that he was flying in and I had to meet him in the airport, and I fell for it. I came to the airport and went to his gate. There was no one there, and I started to panic. Next thing I knew, there were thirteen holes through my shirt and I was standing above my body. The girl was looking at me and smirking, and I flew into a rage, beating her up so badly that she died. She’s not the best person to have to spend eternity with, but I try to stay away from her.

“So, yeah, that’s my story.” She tries to brush it off, but you’re staring at her like she’s the only thing you’ve ever seen. Your eyes are glazed over, and your mouth is slightly open. She looks at you in concern. “Sollux, what’s wrong?”

You step closer to the counter, face-to-face with her. “Aradia.”

“Yes?” she whispers breathlessly. Well, not breathlessly, but—fuck it, that’s beside the point.

“If I try to touch you, will my hand go right through you?”

“No. Ghosts can become solid if they want to.”

You tentatively reach for her face and brush a strand of black hair away from her blank eyes. “What if you tried to kiss a ghost?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers, and when your lips meet, you find out.

Kissing a ghost is like a cool breeze, like the freshness left in your mouth when you brush your teeth. Gentle lips that meet yours in an icy burst, a lingering tingle left behind when you pull away.

You look at her lips, running your thumb over the cleft of her chin.

“Sollux.” Your name comes out of her mouth, and you swear that a choir sings in the background when she utters the syllables. “You know that this isn’t going to work. I’m sorry, but I’m dead. You have a life to live, love to find, and I’m trapped in an airport for eternity. You need to leave.”

“But—“

“GO!” she bellows, and you swear that the air gets colder instantly as her eyes glow blue. You sprint from the bathroom into the terminal, where your flight is boarding. You run through the gate, a seat in first-class awaiting you. You sink into the comfortable warmth of the foam seat and shut your eyes.

“Please fasten your belt and do not smoke on this aircraft.” You notice a man with a long, thin cigarette running towards the bathroom, but you don’t take him into account. You don’t lift your head when smoke floats into the cabin, making your seatmate cough. You don’t open your eyes. Not even when the airplane explodes due to a stray spark hitting the gas tank.

                                                                                                ****

The third time you see her, you’re floating on an invisible wind. You glide into a familiar bathroom, seeing a girl sitting at the counter, hands going up to wipe her tearless eyes. You wrap cold arms around her cold waist, and when she turns around to look at you, her eyes widen. When you pull her into a kiss, she doesn’t resist or pretend that there’s something left in the world. And when you pull away to touch noses with her, you know that though your soul might be here, there’s nothing lost about it.


End file.
